Controlled payment numbers, such as offered by the InControl™ platform by MasterCard®, provide cardholders with great versatility and control over their payment cards. Controls and limits can be set on payment cards for self-imposed budgeting, for management of funds, for limiting spending by children or employees, to provide for greater protection from fraud and theft, and more. Because of the many benefits of their use, controlled payment numbers are steadily seeing more and more use in the market.
However, controlled payment numbers are not without their drawbacks. Because of the vast number of transactions that are processed across their rails every day, payment networks are designed to perform their processing of transactions very quickly, in times measured in milliseconds. This is often accomplished for payment transactions using traditional payment cards with a very high rate of success. However, when a controlled payment number is used, the payment network must often perform additional processing steps, which include the identification of controls active for the controlled payment number and the processing thereof (e.g., checking to see if account limits are met or exceeded). As a result, this can increase processing time for these transactions.
Increased processing time can come as a result of long queues that develop for transactions, a large number of controls that must be calculated and checked, and more. In some instances, a transaction may timeout if not processed quickly enough. For some payment networks, the window for processing a transaction may be so small (e.g., in order to provide greater network efficiency and reliability to its members), that a timeout could even be caused by data being stored on the outer edge of a hard disk rather than closer to the center, with the extra distance resulting in enough of a time increase that the processing time is not met. Because of these additional results and concerns, some controlled payment number transactions may therefore timeout.
Thus, there is a need to provide for more reliable processing of controlled payment number transactions. By providing for better reliability in the processing of controlled payment number transactions, particularly in instances where a controlled payment number transaction would timeout in a traditional payment network, overall network reliability and efficiency may increase, which may be of benefit to not only the payment network themselves, but also to the merchants, issuers, and cardholders associated with the payment network as well.